Execution
by writingfanficlikeabus
Summary: Cathy survives childbirth. Her daughter lives through the consequences.


When Cathy looked back on her life with her mother she couldn't in all honesty think of any really affectionate moment between them. For as long as she could remember everyone in the house was slightly scared of Cathy the elder, who always seemed to her daughter to be nursing some long pent up rage at the world for forcing her inside and at Cathy for being able to run and laugh and strive against the boundaries set out by Edgar when she couldn't herself.

* * *

It had been an unpleasant and painful pregnancy, leaving Cathy the elder not dead (how much better to be dead) but severely limited, the punishment for her self-starvation worse than she could have ever imagined. The result, as well, was unimpressive - a small screaming child, hard to look at, which might have near disgusted her if it had been anyone else's; but she knew it was _hers_, her own thing, her own child, something neither Edgar nor Heathcliff nor anyone else could take from her. And so she tolerated it.

* * *

Liverpool was cold on the day that the wood creaked with footsteps and Cathy looked up and thought about how they wouldn't let her see her mother before the trial.

* * *

"You're a much better mother than me, Nelly," the first Cathy said, pretending not to care, caring a great deal. "I sometimes think she should have been yours." But even as she said it she felt the tug of possession, the knowledge that whatever her opinion of her daughter (named for her in the early hours of the morning when Edgar had been sure she wouldn't live and sat downstairs with his head bowed and his hands covering his ears as though he could block death out by sheer force of will), she would not suffer her to be removed from her side.

Cathy came in that day and tried to pull her mother outside to show her a bird's nest she had found, and Nelly said _Now, you know she's delicate, Cathy,_ and her mother smiled in such a way that for a moment Cathy was sure she hated her.

* * *

Almost time now. The nearby church clock chimed out the hour above the bustle of the city. A crowd had come but Cathy had come first, taken the first stagecoach she could, barely any sleep so she could make sure to be there. Edgar hadn't wanted it, had thought it would upset her as it had upset him, but she insisted and he was too weak by now to protest.

* * *

Cathy thought angrily that if her mother had not been so ill, had not had to sleep so much, she would not have let Linton be sent away. When she told Nelly that, Nelly shook her head and said that Cathy's mother had always been selfish, even when she was young Catherine Earnshaw, and that she would never stop Heathcliff from doing anything he wanted so long as it didn't hurt _her_. Then she covered her mouth like she'd just realised she'd said too much.  
The name stuck with Cathy. _Heathcliff_. She wondered what sort of a man he was, to have such a connection with her mother.

* * *

Next to her, Hareton stood impassively. He had agreed to go with her when she'd asked, but Cathy knew it couldn't mean much to him. The woman up there was his aunt, but he barely knew her. He had only met her a month or two ago. Only after-

* * *

Heathcliff was a great big hulking man who was cruel to his son and no longer believed in kindness. He took Cathy as revenge on her father. She sat on the floor and cried and was so, so scared that something would happen while she was gone from home, because her father was ill and his people weren't long-lived and he would have such a shock when she didn't come back by nighttime. Heathcliff's anger scared her, as well; it matched her mother's resentment with harsher blows of its own.  
Hareton hated her and Linton was mean-spirited and probably dying and she just wanted, she just really wanted -

Her mother appeared on the doorstep of Wuthering Heights a few days later and Heathcliff stared like he'd seen a ghost.  
"Cathy," he said in a whisper. "They told me you were -"  
"Heathcliff," she cried over him, and fell forward, and Cathy thought she saw the flash of metal in her hand.  
She must've dragged herself all the way up the path to get there, must've dodged Edgar's usual watchful gaze to walk step by excruciating step towards her daughter; she looked very pale and ill in the half-light. Heathcliff's eyes flickered to the knife but he still caught her and then -  
He was dead, with Cathy's mother on top of him breathing heavily, seeming in a stupor until she turned to Cathy and her dark eyes flashed and she said,  
"Where's Nelly?"

They were the only witnesses and Cathy still thought they could've buried Heathcliff before anything came of it - just her, and possibly Hareton, although he had cried out like a pained animal at the sight of death, and her mother the murderer - but the image of Heathcliff's body pooling blood on the floor had frozen her mind and no-one else had suggested anything of the sort. They left Wuthering Heights with her and Nelly carrying her mother between them, Hareton and Linton and, begrudgingly on Nelly's part, Joseph traipsing behind them because there wasn't anyone who was willing to stay in the house with the corpse. The only person to shed tears was Hareton; Cathy's mother just stared straight ahead and didn't say anything at all. Edgar had been so worried (he said later) that he rushed to open the door when he saw them coming towards the Grange; taking them in up close he turned pale, even paler than his illness already made him, and for a moment Cathy thought he might've fainted, but he only swayed in the doorway and stared persistently at the blood on his wife's dress until she said impatiently,  
"Stop standing there, Edgar, and let us in."

The body was discovered a week later and the legal proceedings were wheeled out with some grumbling, because Heathcliff was not well liked but he was rich so an investigation was required, and the woman still remembered as the young Catherine Earnshaw (she had been seen walking up there, she had been seen outside and far away from the Grange for the first time in seventeen years) may have always been a troublemaker but she was from old stock. On the day that her mother was taken away, was asked and didn't deny that she'd killed him, Nelly called Cathy to her and told her stories that made her sad to think of the boy that had once been, the girl running through the moors with him beside her, and she remembered the way Heathcliff had the knife go through him with a look like gratitude in his eyes and she almost felt like crying.

* * *

Linton had been too ill to go with her, although they were married now, so she had asked Hareton to come, apologising for her earlier cruelty, and there must have been some kindness in him, or else some satisfaction at seeing the murderess hanged, because he had agreed.  
(She hadn't seen her mother before the trial but in the week it took to find Heathcliff she had asked her _why _and her mother had said, in that hard way of hers,_ because you are my daughter_ with all the weight of her lifetime of anger forced onto _my_).

The news had made its way up and down the country. It had been quite a story. Sensation was always popular, and the tales spread of the Earnshaws, from beginning to end, were nothing if not sensational. So they had sent her to bustling Liverpool, where whole crowds could gather to watch the death of the murderess.

Only one man was needed to carry her up to the scaffold, she was so light. The executioner put the noose round her neck and Cathy stared persistently and stubbornly at her mother's face in the hopes that she would look at her one last time before she died.

Then it was over. No ghosts here - not out in the open air of a busy port. Heathcliff would have to wander the moors alone.

Walking away from the scene a stone fell at her feet, and Cathy turned to see a shoeless brown boy glaring at her defiantly, chin lifted, from across the street, half-starved in a way that Heathcliff (cruel Heathcliff, dead Heathcliff, blood spilling across the floor Heathcliff who her mother had loved and hated) must have been when he first arrived at Wuthering Heights. Angry and alone and ready to be moulded into a monster by the hatred of others.  
No, no, no. She would not let the sound of two bodies hitting the kitchen floor echo in her head forever.  
She would go over to him. She would ask if he had family, anyone to look after him; she would ask him, if he was alone, if he'd like her help.  
Cathy tapped Hareton on the shoulder and before he could look around she was marching across to the boy. It might be a bad idea. Oh yes, it might be a terrible idea.

Or it might not.


End file.
